Pinal Partnership 2025

Economic development priorities

• Promote financing mechanisms or tools to improve local governments’ competitive position for business attraction, retention and expansion.
• Pursue efforts to integrate workforce development programs and job training programs to help companies attract and retain a competitive workforce.
• Support policies that promote the security, reliability and resilience of utility infrastructure and that encourage low and stable energy prices.
• Promote policies to expand and diversify renewable energy production such as solar, bioenergy, geothermal, hydrogen and hydropower.
• Support the expansion of broadband infrastructure to rural communities.
• Support policies that recruit and educate migrant and seasonal farmworkers to sustain and enhance the workforce necessary for a viable agriculture industry.
• Support military veteran preference in hiring.

Education priorities

• Create strategies leading to increased wages, improved working conditions and enhanced professional development for teachers.
• Expand certifications and testing facilities at community colleges to supply skilled labor to meet local workforce needs.
• Focus on building a pipeline of students skilled in STEM-related computer science and technology curriculum.
• Support investments in business training facilities, such as the Drive 48 facility to help train new employees to generate more economic growth.

Transportation, infrastructure priorities

• Support Pinal County and municipalities efforts to fund future transportation improvements with a transaction privilege tax that is approved by voters.
• Encourage state leaders to develop a comprehensive strategy to modernize funding sources to build, operate and maintain transportation infrastructure.
• Support federal funding for Interstate 10 widening, Interstate 11 expansion and other high-capacity road networks.
• Pursue grant opportunities for expanding Pinal County transportation systems.

Water resources priorities

• Support policies that enable communities to gain access to and secure long-term sustainable and fiscally responsible water resources that reduce groundwater dependence.
• Pursue larger contributions from other Colorado River Basin states to conserve additional Colorado River water. This will help achieve the protection volumes identified by the Bureau of Reclamation to ensure Arizona does not continue to carry a disproportionate burden of reductions.
• Encourage Arizona Department of Water Resources to continue reviewing, refining and updating the Pinal Active Management Area 100-year assured water supply model to provide more certainty for new development, business investment and economy.

Government relations priorities

• Support efforts by Arizona cities, towns and counties to protect state-shared revenue streams and local government’s tax revenue streams to promote local autonomy.
• Eliminate the state’s practice of “fund sweeps” to pay for other general fund activities.
• Ensure the sales tax system creates a sustainable system that maintains state and local revenues.
• Support efforts to ensure that Arizona elections are conducted in a secure and modern fashion. We oppose measures that make it more difficult for qualified Arizona citizens to vote, including eliminating early voting, adding redundant methods of verification that don’t contribute to ballot security, or creating inequitable barriers to voting.

Health care priorities

• Support policies that address the unprecedented worker shortages across the health care industry.
• Support efforts to train and recruit physicians, nurses and other health care professionals through increased fellowships and restoration of state funding for Graduate Medical Education.
• Advocate for continued state support of Arizona’s public medical schools, along with resources and policies that support all of Arizona’s medical schools to address workforce needs.

Tourism, open space, trails priorities

• Support efforts by the county, cities and towns to expand recreation and tourism opportunities.
• Promote public awareness of the economic, social, health and environmental benefits of parks, trails and open space.
• Support actions establishing Dark Sky designations and policies.